Akkadian poem in five tablets, also known as Erra and Ishum, in which the god of plague and war is roused, talked round by his attendant Ishum, and devastates Babylonia before being calmed. Its oldest manuscripts come from the seventh-century library at Nineveh; its colophon names Kabti-ilani-Marduk, who presents the poem as a vision received at night; and scholars place its composition between the ninth and seventh centuries B.C., most commonly the eighth. Andrew George reads it as an allegorical response to a long period of weak rule and disorder in Babylonia. The standard editions are P. F. Goessmann (1955) and L. Cagni (1969).
Zecharia Sitchin reads it instead as an eyewitness report of a decision to use nuclear weapons. In The Wars of Gods and Men the council of the poem becomes the council behind Genesis 18 and 19, the Awesome Seven become warheads, and the strike falls in 2024 B.C. on the Sinai spaceport and the cities of the plain.
Two identifications carry that reading, and they are not equally supported. Erra as Nergal is standard. Ishum as Ninurta is not: Ishum is a distinct Akkadian deity, a divine night watchman with fire associations, the sukkal or attendant of Nergal, equated in bilingual texts with the Sumerian Hendursaga, and nothing in the lexical tradition connects him to Ninurta. It is the load-bearing step, because it is what makes the god who pleads for the righteous the same figure who besieged Giza. The larger problem is date: on any preferred range the poem is a first-millennium composition, which places it more than a thousand years after the events it is read as reporting.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · Anunnaki · Enuma Elish · Atra-Hasis Epic · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Michael S. Heiser · Ninurta